Sri Lanka has launched a five-year plan with the Food and Agriculture Organization to reduce food loss and waste, NewsFirst reported on Tuesday, the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste.
Dr. W.C.B. Weerasinghe of the Institute of Post Harvest Management in Anuradhapura said nearly 30% of the food produced in Sri Lanka goes to waste. Urban areas alone discard approximately 4,000 metric tonnes of perfectly edible food every day, he said.
NewsFirst gave the day’s theme as “Climate action for food loss and waste reduction,” and cited the latest United Nations figures putting the number of people in chronic hunger at 735 million, or 9.2% of the world’s population.
What the report does not say
The plan is the story’s central claim and also its thinnest. NewsFirst does not name the plan, identify the ministry or agency leading it, give a start date, a budget, or any target for the reduction it is meant to achieve. It says only that the plan is “comprehensive,” runs five years, and was launched in collaboration with the FAO.
LankaNewz found no second Sri Lankan newsroom carrying the launch on Tuesday, and no FAO or government announcement matching the description. The figures attributed to Dr. Weerasinghe should be read as his, not as an official statistic.
How the numbers compare
The 30% figure is in the range previously reported for post-harvest losses specifically — the share lost between the field and the market, rather than total food waste. Whether Tuesday’s figure covers the same ground or the whole chain, including household and food-service waste, is not stated.
The 4,000-tonne daily urban figure is broadly consistent with earlier national estimates of food waste in Sri Lanka, which have clustered just under 4,000 tonnes a day.
A separate warning delivered to a National Science Foundation forum in May put household food waste alone at more than 1.6 million tonnes a year and restaurant waste in the Colombo district at close to 110 tonnes a day, and identified wild-animal crop damage of Rs. 17 billion to Rs. 20 billion a year as a loss occurring before harvest.
Those accounts and Tuesday’s describe the same problem from different points in the chain. None of them has so far been matched to a published national plan with measurable targets.
